\- MAN- OF -THE ■WORLD 



'NNIE PAYSON CALL 




Class __3Xli"ll 

Book r/?5 

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COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



A MAN OF THE WORLD 



A Man of theWorld 



BY 

ANNIE PAYSON CALL 

Author of 

" Power Thrpugh Repose/' ''As a Matter of 
Course," "The Freedom of Life " 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1905 



Two 0CPI8» ?l«go(ycK. 

OCT. i lyob 






^^:t^ 



Copyright, 1905, 
^By LnTLE, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 



Published October, 190S 



THB UNIYEBSITT PRESS, CAMBEIDOB, U. S. A. 



A MAN of the WORLD 



THERE are two worlds in the 
minds of men : the one is arti- 
ficial, selfish, and personal, the other is 
real and universal ; the one is limited, 
material, essentially of the earth, the 
other supposes a kind of larger cos- 
mopolitanism, and has no geographical 
limits at all ; it is as wide as humanity 
itself, and only bounded by the capac- 
ity for experience, insight, and sympa- 
1 1 



A Man of the World 

thy in the mind and heart of man. A 
true man of the world, therefore, is not 
primarily of it, — a true man of the 
world must know and understand the 
world ; and in order to do so, he 
should be able at any time to get it 
into perspective. 

Charles Dickens says that by a man 
who knows the world is too frequently 
understood " sl man who knows all 
the villains in it." It is of course, by 
gentlemen, also understood that a man 
who knows the world knows all its 
manners and customs, and can adapt 
himself to them easily and entirely, 
wherever he may be. But this ex- 

2 



A Man of the World 

ternal polish does not preclude the 
idea, even among so-called well-bred 
men, that a man who knows the world 
knows all the villains in it, and such a 
man may be more or less of a villain 
himself, provided he has the cleverness 
and the ingenuity to hide his villainy. 
To a certain extent the appearance of 
virtue has been always more or less of 
a necessity in the world, but the moral 
standards in social, professional, and 
business life are inconsistent and mixed. 
Even in essentials the highest stand- 
ards are often modified to suit the 
preference of the majority. It is not 
always considered dishonorable for a 

3 



A Man of the World 

man to cheat in business, so long as 
the cheating is done wdthoiit interfer- 
ing in any way A^dth the general cus- 
toms of the busmess world. 

When we say that a man of the 
world is generally understood to be a 
man who '' knows all the ^dllains in it/' 
it seems at first sight an extreme state- 
ment, but as the world goes now, it cer- 
tainly represents the general tendency 
of thought. The distinction is too 
seldom made between a man of the 
world and a worldly man, — between a 
man w^ho really knows the world as it 
is and a man whose familiarity mth it 
is narrow and sordid. When people 

4 



A Man of the World 

speak of ''seeing life" they seldom 
mean seeing the best of it. 

The same tendency toward perver- 
sion, as being the more interesting 
phase of life, is found among physi- 
cians and trained nurses. A good 
physician once told me, with pained 
indignation, that his students would 
go miles to see an abnormal growth of 
tumor, but not one of them would 
turn around to enjoy the mechanism 
of a healthy heart. And it is a 
well-known fact that many trained 
nurses will lose interest in a case the 
moment a patient begins to recover. 
''A splendid case of typhoid fever " isj 
5 



A Man of the World 

not a case in which the patient is 
thro^^-ing off the effects of the genu 
with wholesome promptness, but one 
in which the o^erm is doinoj its worst, 
— where the iUness is extreme, and 
the dehrium exciting. To be sure, in 
such a case, there is intense interest in 
taking all possible means, with prompt- 
ness and decision, to save the patient s 
life : but. if this were done only with a 
keen love of wholesomeness and nor- 
mal health, the interest of the nurses 
and physicians would never wane until 
the patient had become strong and 
vigorous. If the standard of the best 
physical health were steadily before 
6 



A Man of the World 

the eyes of physician and nurse, and if 
both had a strong desire to bring the 
patient, as nearly as possible, up to 
their own high standard of health, 
there would be a very great difference 
in the atmosphere of sick rooms and 
hospitals. The work of physicians 
and nurses seems to be more often 
that of protection against disease than 
that of achievement of health ; and 
the distinction, though at first sight it 
may seem a fine one, is nevertheless 
radical. 

Note the parallel between this neg- 
ative tendency toward health of body, 
and the same negative tendency in the 
7 



A Man of the World 

world toward health of soul. It is 
protection against the worst ravages 
of sin which is the moral aim of the 
majority of the world ; not a striving 
toward a positive standard of healthy 
life for both soul and body. What is 
sin but disease of the soul? Sin is 
just as truly, just as practically, disease 
of the soul, as any form of known 
malady is disease of the body. If we 
could impress ourselves strongly with 
the fact that sin is disease, — disorder 
and abnormality, — it would be a 
radical step toward freedom from sin. 
By sin is meant every kind of selfish- 
ness, — whatever form it may take. 

8 



A Man of the World 

A young friend, in speaking of a 
companion charming in his words and 
manners and most attractive because 
of his artistic temperament, but evi- 
dently loose in his ideas of morality, 
once expressed the opinion that it was 
" all right " to associate with this 
charming man, — enjoying all that 
was delightful in him and ignoring, 
so far as possible, all that was evi- 
dently bad. 

" Could you ignore dirty nails, dirty 
ears, and a bad smell about your com- 
panion ? " someone asked. 

Whereupon the young man ex- 
claimed, with an expression of su- 
9 



A Man of the World 

preme disgust, '' How can you speak 
of such things, — of course I could not 
stay with him for five minutes ! " 

But he did not in the least associate 
the loose, light, unclean way of look- 
ing at human relations, with the same 
careless uncleanness as applied to the 
body. And yet, in reality, the one 
kind of uncleanness corresponds pre- 
cisely to the other. In the one case 
the dirt is on the inside and is what 
we may call living dirt, because it is 
kept alive by the soul to which it is 
allowed to cling. In the other case 
the dirt is on the outside, and can be 
washed off wdth soap and water. Very 

10 



A Man of the World 

few so-called men or women of the 
world are willing to appear dirty and 
slovenly in their bodies, — but a great 
many are willing to be dirty and 
slovenly in their souls. A curious 
and significant fact it is, that often, 
when a man's nerves give way, even 
when his external habits have been 
most cleanly, or even fastidious, they 
may change entirely, and he may go 
about with spotted clothes, dirty 
hands, and a general slovenly appear- 
ance, whereas such external shiftless- 
ness would have been impossible to 
him while his nerves were compara- 
tively well and strong. 
11 



A Man of the World 

^Vlien such a man's nerves give 
way, so that he loses to some extent 
the external use of his will, the dirty 
habits of his mind appear in slovenly 
and dirty habits of bodv, because he 
has no longer the will-power to c<m- 
fine them to his private thou^ts and 
feelings. The habits of his body be- 
come then a true expression of his 
state of mini 

We may prove the relation between 
sin and disease by tracing what mi^t 
be called a mild sin to its logical ex- 
treme. Just as we may follow almost 
any disease in its development, until 
it causes the death of the body, if the 
12 



A Man of the World 

body is not protected from its growth, 
so we may follow any sin in its devel- 
opment to the death of the soul, if the 
soul is not similarly protected. All 
sin, when allowed to increase according 
to its own laws, is the destruction of 
both soul and body. 

Macbeth 's mind became diseased ; 
and we may find many an lago in our 
insane asylums to-day, for, with all his 
cleverness, no lago can, in the long 
run, keep control of his mind if his 
selfish plans are frustrated. The loath- 
some diseases of the body which are 
liable to overtake a Don Juan may 
only be spoken of, or thought of, as a 

13 



A Man of the World 

means of removing the blindness of 
those who, from dwelling upon the 
sensations of the body, come to think 
of sin as pleasant. When their blind- 
ness is removed, the least touch of the 
sensuality which causes the disease will 
fill them with wholesome horror. It 
is wonderfully provided by the Creator 
that any sensation, which is selfishly 
indulged in, any sensation that a man 
remains in for its own sake, must 
lead first to satiety, — and then to 
worse than satiety and death. This 
is true both of all selfish sensations of 
the body and of all useless emotions 
of the mind. Our sensations and our 
14 



A Man of the World 

emotions must be obedient servants 
to a wholesome, vigorous love of use- 
fulness, or they become infernal mas- 
ters whose rule leads only to weakness 
and death. 

The old asceticism, — the spiritual 
stupidity of primitive times, — placed 
the world, the flesh, and the devil on 
a level of equality, whereas both the 
world and the flesh are capable of 
noble uses, but the devil is not. The 
world and the flesh are servants, and 
good servants; they are necessary in- 
struments for the carrying out of the 
Divine purpose in human life. But the 
devil is merely the perversion of good 

15 



A Man of the World 

things to useless, trivial, and degrading 
ends. He has no power in himself 
except as we give him power, and we 
give him power every day when we 
associate the idea of the world \\dth 
that of the villains in it, and when we 
debase the flesh by not realizing the 
clean, good service for which it is in- 
tended. Indeed, we are really feeding 
the devil in so far as our standards of 
life are negative, and not positive, — 
in so far as we are only busy in pro- 
tecting ourselves from worse sin or 
from worse disease, instead of casting 
out all sill and disease as fast as we 
perceive them in ourselves, and work- 
16 



A Man of the World 

ing toward the highest possible stan- 
dard of wholesome life for body and 
souL To '' look to the Lord and shun 
evils as sins J' means to hold to the 
standard of health given us by the 
Lord for both body and soul, so that 
it may become more and more clear 
as we apply it to life with persistent 
strength. Our present standards of life 
are warped. The abnormal has be- 
come so familiar to us as to seem nor- 
mal. The joy and life-giving power 
of fresh air for soul and body is too 
little known to us. A thoroughly 
healthy world, with wholesome habits 
of mind and body, is almost out of our 
9 17 



A Man of the World 

ken. The lower standards have be- 
come too generally a matter of course, 
— that is why we do not think of 
brave and wholesome manhood when 
we use the expression '' a man of the 
world." 

It is a certain fact that no man can 
understand and live in what is good 
and wholesome, of his own free will, 
without having had temptations, — 
and strong ones, — to what is evil and 
unwholesome. Thus a knowledge of 
the evil in the world enlarges a man's 
experience just in so far as he uses that 
knowledge to lead him to the opposite 
good. A knowledge of evil warps a 

18 



A Man of the \A/'orld 

man's character, — however broad his 
experience may be, — just in so far as 
he yields to the evil and allows it to 
become a part of himself. 

''And ye shall know the truth and 
the truth shall make you free." The 
truth which makes us free is the 
truth about ourselves, the truth about 
evil, the truth about everything, and 
our freedom is full and expansive in 
proportion as we recognize, acknowl- 
edge, and live by the truth, both in 
general and in detail. 



19 



II 

" T AM a man and nothing human 
-■^ do I consider ahen to me," said 
Terence two thousand years ago. 

A man who thoroughly knows the 
world must be capable of understand- 
ing all phases of life, — not only those 
of his own country, class, profession, 
or sect. It is the humanity in all its 
phases that he loves and understands, 
— not the phase itself ; and therefore 
nothing that is human can be so re- 
mote as to be unintelligible to his 

20 



A Man of the World 

mind or without the power of appeal 
to his heart. lago could never un- 
derstand honesty or generosity. Don 
Juan could never understand chastity. 
On the other hand it is possible for an 
honest man to understand lago, and 
for a clean man to understand Don 
Juan. Although in neither case will 
the man who understands sympathize 
with the sin, in both cases the under- 
standing will be clear and comprehen- 
sive. A child cannot understand either 
lago or Don Juan, neither can a childish 
man ; but a truly childlike man can 
understand all phases of temptation 
and sin, and estimate them justly, 

21 



A Man of the World 

There is an innocence of ignorance, 
and there is an innocence of wisdom. 
The innocence of ignorance is involun- 
tary. It is innocence because it can- 
not be anything else. A little child 
is in the innocence of ignorance, and 
it is from that protective innocence 
that we feel the fresh, happy atmos- 
phere of childhood. The innocence of 
wisdom is possible only to those who 
have known temptation and, through 
overcoming it, have learned to recog- 
nize all sin for what it really is, — the 
filth and disease of the soul, and to 
avoid it as such. The fresh life that 
springs from such struggle and con- 

22 



A Man of the World 

quest of selfish tendencies brings with 
it a vigor of innocence which has a 
quality of life akin to that of a healthy 
child, with the added power and in- 
sight of a man's maturity. Whatever 
form or phase of temptation his fellow 
men may be in, such a man, from his 
own experience, has found the means 
of understanding them. He has found 
the means of understanding his neigh- 
bor, whether the neighbor is immersed 
in self-indulgence, is struggling desper- 
ately to gain his freedom, or is well 
along upon the upward path. 

A man who can only understand 
certain special phases of human nature 

23 



A Man of the World 

is narrow and provincial, however he 
may assume the au^ of a man of the 
world ; and the false assumption of a 
broad understanding renders him prac- 
tically still more narrow and provin- 
cial, for it stands in the way of his 
learning from those who have it in 
their power to instruct him. But the 
true man of the world, whose breadth 
of vision and penetration of insight are 
the result of a working familiarity 
with universal principles in practical 
life, detests sin without condemning 
the sinner, and is not befooled by the 
shallow pretensions of the provincial 
Pharisee. 

24 



A Man of the World 

To know the world we must not 
only be able to understand all phases 
of it in general, but we must also un- 
derstand the various types in partic- 
ular. There are nations, there are 
grades and phases of life in each 
nation, and there are individuals in 
each phase. There is as great a dif- 
ference between the individuals of a 
small community of people, if one has 
the eye to detect it, as there is between 
nations. 

I remember once talking with a 
famous anthropologist. All men were 
to him simply representations of ages, 
nations, or families. No man was a 

25 



A Man of the World 

man in himself ; he was simply a speci- 
men. It gave to a little everyday 
person a very keen sense of the vast- 
ness of humanity in general, past and 
present, to hear this scientific man 
talk. He had the habit of swinging 
all the nations of the world into his 
conversation as easily as if he lived 
with them every day, as in his habitual 
thought he truly did. Whenever I 
would speak to him of a friend or a 
relative he would characterize him by 
his national and family tendency. To 
talk mth the Professor for an hour or 
two was most enlightening and ex- 
panding ; but a long acquaintance 
26 



A Man of the World 

proved that a man, even in the region 
of large anthropological and geograph- 
ical ideas, could be just as narrow 
and provincial as the self-appointed 
moral censor of a country town. The 
human body and the human mind, in 
general, seemed to mean a very great 
deal to him, but man as an individual 
soul meant nothing at all. 

Some of the greatest diplomats, 
who have stood out as clever in 
their dealings with nations, have 
been limited in the extreme when 
their lives took them outside of the 
rut of their own immediate work. 
Statesmen who have dealt cleverly 

27 



A Man of the \Vorld 

with nations have blundered sadly in 
their dealings with individual men, 
blundered sometimes when their mis- 
takes would react upon their national 
influence. And yet so established 
were they in the selfish rut of their 
national diplomacy, so provincial were 
they in the knowledge of individual 
human nature, that they went on 
blundering, until many a time their 
mistakes led them almost, if not quite, 
to national disaster. The best law- 
yers know that to do their work truly 
they must be able to judge particular 
cases and special circumstances by 
standards which to the majority of 

28 



A Man of the World 

minds do not exist. For want of such 
clear understanding of human nature 
which comes from an original instinct 
for truth itself, — as distinguished from 
the cut-and-dried application of con- 
ventional habit, — lawyers have often 
failed. 

Conventional standards are the com- 
mon standards of the majority ; but, 
although they are perhaps more ser- 
viceable than any others in the achieve- 
ment of commonplace success, they 
are invariably inadequate on a really 
high and simple plane of human en- 
deavor. It is rare to find an active 
man engaged in worldly business who 
29 



A Man of the World 

recognizes the laws of simple unsel- 
fishness and truth as having any prac- 
tical existence in human affairs ; but 
it is still more rare to find such a 
man understanding the true relation 
between essential goodness and the 
conventional principles of morality. 
There are times when those who act 
fi-om higher standards must appear to 
contradict entirely all conventional 
modes of life, but they do not neces- 
sarily oppose such conventions, for 
through a courageous adherence to the 
spirit of the law they eventually bring 
new hfe to its letter. The true man 
of the world is he who can express his 

30 



A Man of the \A/^orld 

essential goodness and truth in wise 
and appropriate ways, and in terms 
which must be, in the long run, intel- 
ligible to all kinds of men. 

When Jesus Christ healed a man 
on the Sabbath day, He not only ig- 
nored the conventional standards of 
His nation, but He appeared to dis- 
obey one of the fundamental com- 
mandments of the law. The Pharisees, 
and all the people about Him who 
stood well in the eyes of the world, 
were angrily indignant. It is not 
difficult to imagine, after it was all 
over, a kind and conventional soul 
coming to the Lord and asking Him 

31 



A Man of the World 

why He had not waited until the next 
day before carrying out His intention ; 
— He would not have had to wait long, 
and the displeasure of the Pharisees 
would have been avoided. ^^ Would 
it not have been more charitable to 
respect the religious scruples of the 
Jews ? Is it not wrong to fly need- 
lessly in the face of respectable public 
opinion? Was it not unwise need- 
lessly to break the letter of the com- 
mandment, even while keeping its 
spirit ? " Some doubting soul, who 
wanted to believe in the goodness of 
the Lord and the purity of His motive, 
might well have put all these questions 

32 



1 



A Man of the World 

to Him with a sincere and conscien- 
tious desire to serve. And yet this 
doubter, with all his conscientious 
kindness, would have been blind and 
stupid. For only the self-righteous or 
the morally stupid could fail to under- 
stand that, in healing a sick man on 
the Sabbath day, our Lord was estab- 
lishing a new precedent of a truer and 
deeper obedience for all mankind. The 
Pharisees were convinced of their own 
goodness ; it would not have occurred 
to them as possible that they were 
narrow, provincial, and self-righteous. 
They would not have admitted for an 
instant the possibility of any circum- 
3 ss 



A Man of the World 

stances under which it might be right 
to perform a radical cure on the Sab- 
bath day ; and they persuaded them- 
selves that they were " doing God 
service " when they subjected to an 
ignominious execution the man who 
had so roused all their personal and 
selfish antagonism. The Pharisees 
were hopelessly unable to understand 
Him, but that was because of their 
own blindness. In laying down the 
principle that the Sabbath was made 
for man and not man for the Sabbath, 
our Lord was expressing an eternal 
truth, not only to the world of His 
own time but to the world of all ages. 



A Man of the World 

To associate the idea of a man of 
the world with a knowledge of its dark 
places and shallow forms alone, tends 
to belittle and degrade our conception 
of the world ; whereas the world, so 
far from being only dark or shallow, is 
well worth knowing and serving, pro- 
vided it is made to serve, in its turn, 
all that is vigorous and wholesome in 
man. We should recognize the beauty 
and power of the things of this world 
as servants to our highest law ; it is 
only the perversion of those things 
that is to be renounced. 

The true man of the world under- 

35 



A Man of the World 

stands perverted human nature, — from 
the gourmand to the keen pohtical 
sharper ; he is a man who is never 
deceived by appearances, and who sees 
the real character beneath its external 
polish ; a man who, with his clearer 
understanding, takes each perversion 
at its true value, understands the lagos 
and the Don Juans equally well, with 
no slightest taste for either. They are 
all forms of disease to him. He can 
trace lago's villainy to its own de- 
struction and Don Juan's sensuality to 
its worse than satiety. 

Again, a true man of the world is a 
man who knows, and loves, and is a 
36 



A Man of the World 

part of all the wholesomeness in the 
world ; a man who is quickly at home 
in every variety of good form, because 
the instincts of a gentleman are the 
same all the world over, although cus- 
toms may differ entirely ; a man who, 
while accustomed to all conventions 
and respecting them where they prop- 
erly belong, is easily and happily at 
home without them ; a man who, 
while preferring fine instincts as well 
as strong characters in his fellow men, 
is so alive to the best in human nature 
that he can find the gold thread any- 
where in the wax, if there is a gold 
thread there ; a man whose thoughts 
37 



A Man of the World 

are so much at home in fresh ah that 
he at once detects a close or tainted 
atmosphere, but can keep the unpleas- 
ant sensation to himself; who never 
intrudes his love of fresh air upon 
others, but, being surrounded by it 
himself, enjoys it habitually and as a 
matter of course. Such a man can 
never be caught unawares ; he is a 
gentleman in all emergencies, because 
he camiot be otherwise than himself, 
and he never appears what he is not. 

A true man of the world is not of 
the world primarily, although he serves 
the world and is served by it ; it is to 
him always a means to a higher end, 

38 



A Man of the World 

— never an end in itself. It was of 
true men of the world that the Lord 
spoke when He said, " I pray not that 
Thou shouldest take them out of the 
world, but that Thou shouldest keep 
them from the evil!" 



39 



ni 

TTIROM the point of view of good 
^ we can see and understand evil, 
but from the point of view of evil we 
can neither see nor understand real 
goodness. A man to understand the 
world must be in the process of gain- 
ing his freedom from its evils. He 
must be learning to live according to 
universal and interior standards, not 
according to the standards of a special 
time, or of the people who happen to 
be about him; and, in the process, he 

40 



^1 



A Man of the World 

will learn that faithfulness to his own 
sincere perception of universal truth will 
lead him eventually into true harmony 
with the best in others. We know of 
only one man in the history of the 
world who lived his whole life in a 
manner consistent with his highest 
standards. 

The world is a great, well-kept school. 
No one who believes in immortality 
can possibly doubt that the short space 
of time we are here is meant for train- 
ing, — training to prepare us for our 
work hereafter, whatever that may be, 
by doing our work here well. If we 
start with the belief that the world is 

41 



A Man of the World 

a school, and that we do not want to 
stay in the primary class, but that we 
want to go through all the classes and 
to graduate honorably, — if that con- 
viction is strong in our minds, it is 
astonishing to realize what a new as- 
pect life will have for us. In general 
and in every detail life will be full of 
living interest. No trouble will be 
too hard to bear; there will be no 
circumstances that we would run away 
from. We shall want to learn all our 
lessons, to pass all our examinations, 
and to get the living power for use to 
others which is the logical result. 
To love his neighbor as himself, a 

42 



A Man of the World 

man must be able truly to sympathize 
with his neighbor and to see through 
his neighbor's eyes. By this 1 do not 
mean that the neighbor's point of view 
must be his own, but that he should be 
able to understand it as if it were his 
own. If a man does this, he can 
understand the wrong or the right of 
it much more clearly; and can, when 
advisable, modify his own point of view 
according to his neighbor's. One can 
easily recognize the advantage it is to 
a doctor, a lawyer, a minister, or a 
business man, to be able and willing 
always to grasp the point of view of 
other people. A doctor makes up his 

43 



A Man of the World 

mind as to the best course to take in 
regard to his patient. The patient 
tells him a long story describing his 
own state of mind, which seems to the 
doctor, according to his own experi- 
ence, entirely ridiculous. If he ex- 
cludes all appreciation of his patient's 
point of view and holds harshly to his 
own ideas, he loses the most important 
means for performing a perfect cure. 
If he listens attentively, and earnestly 
tries to appreciate what may be good 
in his patient's ideas, so that the patient 
feels his sympathy, an opportunity is 
thus opened to lead the patient gradu- 
ally to common sense. In so far as 

44 



A Man of the World 

the physician closes his mind to his 
patient's point of view, in so far he is 
narrow and lacking in the true spirit 
of a man of the world. 

A good, clear-headed lawyer should 
understand not only his client's point 
of view, but also that of his opponent. 
A man can never lose his own ground 
by truly " throwing himself on the 
side of his antagonist." An all-round 
clear-headedness is a necessity to the 
best growth in us of true principles. 
When a man's eye is single his ^hole 
body will be full of light, and such 
light penetrates far and wide within 
and along the whole horizon, and 

45 



A Man of the World 

shows characters, affairs, and circum- 
stances, for what they really are. But 
no man's eye can be single unless he 
takes a clear, unprejudiced view of his 
fellow men in all phases and varieties 
of life. The very large number and 
variety of people who come steadily for 
help to a physician or minister receive 
the greatest help when the physician 
or minister understands the world en- 
tirely without prejudice. A quiet un- 
derstanding of human nature, and a 
brave, gentle manner of dealing with 
others is one of the greatest blessings 
that can come to any man. 

It is absolutely impossible to rid 
46 



3 



A Man of the World 

ourselves of prejudice without at the 
same time gaining freedom from self- 
love. If a man is favorably prejudiced 
in a certain direction, it is because there 
is something in the opposite direction 
which offends his selfishness. To gain 
freedom from the prejudice he must 
see and acknowledge heartily the self- 
ishness in himself which is at its root. 
This is often a difficult thing to do, for 
a prejudice may have come to us 
through the selfish egotism of some 
far-away ancestor, and may have be- 
come rooted in our own personality 
before we realized its true nature. 
To be a man of the world one must 

47 



A Man of the World 

be able to understand the world, — not 
three or four corners of it, but the 
whole of it. This expansion of mind 
and soul is possible to every man who 
will first understand himself, and no 
man can understand himself who is 
blindly indulging his own selfishness. 
Every day we are seeing people who 
are living and acting in the grossest 
selfishness and they do not know it. 
Such people sometimes frighten those 
who are observing them. 

"If John Smith," I say to myself, 
'' is the human beast that I see him to 
be, and does not know it, perhaps I 
am unconsciously just as brutal as 

48 



A Man of the World 

John, and do not know it; and if I 
am, how can I find it out?" 

We must have the habit of first 
casting the beam out of our own eye, 
before we can be ready to help take 
the mote from our brother's eye ; and 
the only possible way to be sure of 
finding ourselves out, is to be quietly, 
willingly, open to criticism ; to take 
every criticism, not with a desire to 
prove ourselves right, but with an 
earnest desire to find out and act upon 
the truth. I do not mean necessarily 
to invite criticism, — it will come fast 
enough without invitation, — but to 
welcome it when it appears, and to try 
4 49 



A Man of the World 

at once to see ourselves with the eyes 
of our critics. 

So simple and straightforward is the 
road to travel, when we sincerely want 
to become true men of the world, that 
the expansion of heart and mind re- 
sulting from a steady walking upon 
this road must seem impossible to 
worldly men. And yet the narrowness 
of worldly men is in its essence similar 
to the narrowness of the dwellers in 
a small, gossiping country town. The 
worldly men have more superficial 
knowledge than the inhabitants of the 
country town, but they do not neces- 
sarily have any stronger grasp on the 

50 



A Man of the World 

world-wide principles of human nature. 
Worldliness is the love of ease and 
the pride of life upon a low plane of 
commonplace existence, but a true 
knowledge of the world requires a 
higher elevation. 

The ascent of narrow paths and 
steep inclines leads to the mountain 
top ; thence the outlook is wide, and 
the heights and depths of the landscape 
take their proper places in their true 
relation to each other. The single- 
minded drudgery and toil which pro- 
duces character leads also to the 
wisdom of the seer. Only from the 
point of view of unselfish love and 

51 



A Man of the World 

truth can we get a well-balanced 
and extended view of the heights and 
depths and commonplaces of the world. 
We have seen that a man, to know 
the world, must know and understand 
its individuals and types. We have 
seen that it is out of the question to 
understand other individuals, so long 
as we are clogged by our own selfish- 
ness or prejudice. We know that, to 
understand the point of view of an- 
other person, we must be clear, open- 
minded, and well grounded in true 
principles. We cannot understand 
another person's point of view truly 
when we are swayed and blinded 

52 



A Man of the World 

by its influence, so that it sweeps us 
off our feet and takes possession of us 
in spite of ourselves. We must have 
true standards to judge others by, and 
those must be standards which we 
have tried and proved, over and over, 
for ourselves. 

At once the most interesting and 
the most profitable character-study in 
the world is the life of the one man 
whose life was consistently faithful to 
a standard which was universally true 
and all His own, and that standard 
He has given us for ours. Many 
of us fail in our interpretation of it, 
but, if we work diligently to try it 

53 



A Man of the World 

and to prove it, and are openly willing 
and glad to acknowledge whenever 
we have misinterpreted it, we shall 
be steadily enlightened as to its true 
meaning. 

The delight of applying the laws of 
science and of seeing them work, the 
positive joy of watching the certain 
result of a well-managed scientific ex- 
periment is known to many a chemist 
or electrician. But the joy of testing 
the practical working of spiritual laws 
should be deeper, and more quiet, and 
more expanding than all other delights ; 
for the spiritual law, if it exists at all, 
must underlie all material law. 

54 



A Man of the World 

Just as our problems in chemistry 
or in physics must fail over and over 
before we have the quiet satisfaction 
of seeing them work, so must we go 
through test after test before we can 
be firmly established in all the laws 
of human relations. 

The standard of character and life 
represented by the idea of the man 
of the world has been dwarfed by a 
superficial notion of the meaning of 
" the world." " The world " means 
many things to many men, and these 
different meanings are of various de- 
grees of truth and falsehood; but we 
shall find that, generally speaking, 

55 



A Man of the World 

they are more and more true in pro- 
portion as the people who hold them 
are possessed of vigorous character. 
In art and literature we know that 
the greatest truth and the deepest 
beauty is that which appeals at all 
times to all men. It appeals to 
the universal human heart and mind, 
and thus it is inconceivable that 
the human race should ever tire of 
Shakespere, or Dante, or the Bible. 
Such books, whatever personal opin- 
ions or beliefs we may attach to them, 
are universally acceptable to all men, 
because they appeal to common human 
experience and apply the principles of 
56 



A Man of the World 

irresistible human logic. They are 
the books of the world. 

The world itself is an organism cor- 
responding to that of the individual 
man, and the particular individual 
whose heart and mind lives and thinks 
most nearly in harmony with the best 
life and thought of the world is its 
truest citizen. On the other hand, the 
individual whose motives and interests 
in life are confined to the narrowest 
circle of experience represents the ex- 
treme type of provincialism. The dif- 
ference between these two extremes 
is not a matter of long, varied, or 
conventional experience, but of ex- 
57 



A Man of the World 

perience in those elements of human 
nature which are at its root and not 
at its surface. The statesman, the 
capitalist, the experienced traveller, al- 
though they may have intercourse with 
men in large classes and masses, may 
be essentially petty in the founda- 
tions of their character. These, then, 
are not men of the world in the true 
sense; for, if they were, we should 
have to mean by "the world" numeri- 
cal or mechanical conceptions of men, 
purely intellectual conceptions of their 
thoughts, or geographical ideas regard- 
ing the inhabitants of the earth's sur- 
face. None of these things has any 

58 



A Man of the World 

universal quality, unless it is united to 
the power of human character and 
passion, which carries weight with all 
men at all times and in all places. The 
inhabitant of a country village may 
be, according to his quality, either a 
man of the village or a man of the 
world. It depends upon his breadth 
of mind, his largeness of heart, and 
the depth to which his character will 
absorb the best results of his experi- 
ence. Whatever is purely local, with- 
out being rooted in a general human 
need, — whatever is purely personal, 
without being founded on a universal 
human principle, — whatever is purely 
59 



« 



A Man of the World 

sectarian or national, or pertaining to 
a class or particular clique of persons, 
without being rooted in the same 
general human interests and laws, 
must, to that extent, be petty, pro- 
vincial, trivial, and comparatively use- 
less. Character is, and always has 
been, the motive power of the world ; 
and only through finding his own de- 
velopment of character in the service 
of the world can the individual man 
find his appointed place as its citizen. 
There is no law higher than that which 
is human, in the sense that it is the 
only guide to the growth of what is 
best in human life. This essential 
60 



A Man of the World 

human law, — which is so different from 
that which worldly self-interest has or- 
ganized for its own protection, — is 
that which man derives from the 
Divine. It is the world as made and 
sustained by the heart and mind of 
God of which man must be the citi- 
zen, and only as such is he truly " a 
Man of the World." 



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